Odd Twins: Lisa Yuskavage and Edouard Vuillard

Was it bizarre to have Lisa Yuskavage, the notorious painter of preposterously pulchritudinous young women, discussing the subtle intimist Edouard Vuillard, who is the subject of a retrospective at the Jewish Museum, subtitled “A Painter and His Muses”? To a packed auditorium at the museum recently, Yuskavage, chic in baggy black, acknowledged the perceived frisson of “this hip chick with this old dead artist.” She protested, “But I’m not so hip. I have not had sex with the wife of my art dealer.” The allusion is to Lucy Hessel, the second most important woman, after his corset-maker mother, in the life of the shy French master. They were close for forty years until Vuillard’s death, in 1940, with no reported upset to Lucy’s husband, the dealer Joseph.

In fact, Vuillard’s hypersensitive paintings of people in domestic interiors, especially those from the eighteen-nineties, have influenced Yuskavage since before her student days at Yale, twenty-some years ago. She is not alone in making him a perennial painter’s painter, who wrung poetic drama from unremarkable scenes with excruciating colors, smoldering tonalities, dense patterning, and loamy build-ups of paint. (Her interlocutor, the museum’s chief curator, Norman Kleeblatt, flashed slides of somewhat apposite works by Howard Hodgkin, David Park, Alex Katz, Peter Doig, Kai Althoff, and others; he should have added Fairfield Porter, the late superb painter and critic who argued that modern art had taken a wrong turn when it hewed to Cezanne rather than to Vuillard.) Yuskavage’s analysis of Vuillard’s art, and of her own, amounted to a clinic in painting for painting’s sake. “I’ve spent hundreds of hours looking at Vuillard,” she said. It showed in her talk.

You aren’t properly viewing a Vuillard in any museum, Yuskavage said, “until a guard yells at you.” Seen from a nose’s length away, his broken brushwork reveals glimpses of unpainted ground, often cardboard, which help to account for its peculiarly matter-of-fact luminosity—its knitted light, with trembling contrasts of bright and dark and of warm and cool. She said she doesn’t care about his subject matter—usually a mysteriously fraught relation of the painter to his figures and of his figures to one another—except as “an assumption.” Painters naturally assume the importance of their subjects, she said. Meaning emerges by way of stroke-by-stroke discovery and invention: “making painting happen. The assumption plays out.” For herself, she said, her signature flagrant female is “a personification of painting itself.” That leaves out a lot of blatant, gamy sexual and psychological content—or leaves it, rather, to viewers, to interpret, or not. Her shock-and-awe imagery is surely willful; but it is grounding for the blooms of her deepest passion—to paint—in ever-surprising, delicate nuances. You end up not sure what you’re looking at, but only that it is canny and beautiful.

Certainly, Vuillard and Yuskavage both obsess, across the sex divide, about qualities of the feminine. He couldn’t get enough of contemplating his mother (with whom he lived until her death, when he was sixty), his sister Marie (whose unhappy marriage, to his womanizing friend Kerr-Xavier Roussel, he engineered), his charismatic patroness Misia Natanson, and of course Lucy. Yuskavage showed a slide of her own painting of three girly nudes loitering in the sumptuous interior of an upper-class home that she had visited in Westchester: “a divorcee’s house” that was “all female—everything fluffed and tufted.” She explained that the strange color scheme, with volcanic reds and oranges toward the top, resulted from imagining the color-wheel spectrum tilted at an angle, rotating from foreground to background: making painting happen.

Yuskavage expatiated on a slide of Vuillard’s “The Green Interior” (1891), a painting, not in the show, in which his mother is seen sewing. “She’s like a lump at the bottom—this huge absorptive thing.” A lime-green wall is “green on green on green.” The small picture “is such a modest thing” with “an extreme modesty of scale” and “not a huge amount of bravado.” But it demonstrates powerfully what painting, as painting, can do. Crediting Vuillard with showing her how, she said, “I pile up more and more paintedness.” At last, she broke off with a gesture of embarrassment at presuming to talk about art that is so purely visual and tactile. “We should shut up,” she said. “Vuillard doesn’t need us.”